Cropmark Problems

When uploading a PDF to your Zmags account, it is always best to first ensure that your crop mark settings are in order. Otherwise, problems and delays can occur with the uploading or conversion of your publication. If the Publicator detects crop marks in your PDF, it will display a notification like this:



From there, you can then specify how you would like the converter to proceed by selecting the manner in which you would like the PDF to be cropped.

Note: If the converter needs to crop your PDF for you, it will lose its embedded links in the same way flattening the PDF manually removes them.

Managing Crop Settings
Here's how to access the crop settings in a given PDF:
  1) Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro, or an equivalent program.
  2a) In Windows, click 'Document' > "Crop Pages".
  2b) In Mac OS, click 'Tools' > 'Pages' > 'Crop' and then double-click any page.
  3) There are four separate crop boxes: crop, art, trim, and bleed. Use the drop-down menu near the top of the Crop Pages window to view each of them.

Generally it is recommended to have all crop boxes set to zero before uploading your PDF to Zmags:
  1) Open the "Crop Pages" window using the instructions above.
  2) Under "Page Range" click 'All'.
  3) Under "Margin Controls" click "Set To Zero".
  4) Under "Margin Controls" change the menu item "CropBox" to the next item in the list, ArtBox. Repeat steps 2 and 3.
  5) Repeat steps 2 and 3 for TrimBox and BleedBox as well.
  6) Click OK to close the window. Click 'File', 'Save'.

Of course, if you require a crop box to trim off extra margins in your PDF, you will want to skip setting your "CropBox" to zero and just clear the other three, but as mentioned earlier this will result in the embedded links being removed.

Avoiding Cropmarks
Generally it is always best to avoid dealing with PDF crop marks entirely. This is accomplished by trimming the extra margins out of your PDF right from the start, as it is created from the original InDesign files. This approach will also leave your embedded links intact. For more information, please see the following tutorial:
Zmags PDF InDesign presets Job Options